Gospel & Universe 🧜🏽♀️ The Mermaid
Beyond Alienation
“A Salty Dog” 🧜🏽♀️ “Crucifiction Lane” 🧜🏽♀️ “Suzanne”
Some listeners may have difficulty with the final stanza, finding the logic too paradoxical, the imagery too surreal, and the overall meaning too obscure. Among its many mysteries is the possibility that the ocean bed is either the bottom of the ocean or the bed into which the poet and the heroine fall, presumably to make love. My argument all along has been that the lyric can be read in two ways simultaneously, and that Reid’s ambiguity works from one end of the lyric to the other. The romantic motif smoothly intertwines with the poetic or philosophical ideas, just as the down-to-earth details smoothly intertwine with the nautical, epic, and mythic references.
Still, it may help to compare the ending of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” to other lyrics in which Reid uses nautical and surreal imagery to get at meanings that are layered, paradoxical, and obscure. By doing this, I hope to suggest that there’s a method to his poetic madness, and that even though he has a wide range of styles and meanings, “A Whiter Shade of Pale” lies comfortably within this range. Specifically, I’ll argue that the import of the nautical imagery in “A Whiter Shade of Pale” (1967) lies between the optimism of “A Salty Dog” and the pessimism of “Crucifiction Lane” (both 1969), while his surreal poetical meanings lie much closer to “Homburg” than to “Cerdes” (both 1967).
“A Salty Dog”
“A Salty Dog” is one of the most optimistic of Reid’s lyrics, and hence marks the positive end of a spectrum which also includes the very bleak “Crucifiction Lane.” Looking at the two poems in terms of epic nautical imagery, one might say that “A Salty Dog” climaxes at the moment when Odysseus returns to his home in Ithica, or when Dante sees the Island of Purgatory on the other side of the world. “Crucifiction Lane,” on the other hand, occurs when Odysseus and his men land on the island of the Cyclops Polyphemus, or when Dante peers deep into the suffering of the Inferno. The only problem with these comparisons is of course that previous to Joyce’s Ulysses and Byron’s Don Juan, and previous to the mock epics of the 18th Century, European epics generally contained an overarching Meaning, whether it was the Greek dictates of Fate or the cosmic Plan of the Christian God. In “A Salty Dog” there’s a strong indication of this Meaning, whereas in “Crucifiction Lane” the references to such Meaning only reinforce its absence.
The overall nautical situation of “A Salty Dog” is far rosier than what we find in “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Even the bleak beginning of “A Salty Dog” only highlights its luminous ending. At first, the ship has “run a float”; they are on a “twisted path” and a “tortured course”; they sail to where “ships come home to die” and to where there is “No lofty peak, nor fortress bold.” Yet their ship then goes “around the horn” and “Upon the seventh seasick day” the crew sees “A sand so white, and sea so blue, / No mortal place at all.” The slow and eery music initially suggests some sort of catastrophe — like in Reid’s “The Wreck of the Hesperus” (1969) — yet the crew seems to have stumbled instead upon paradise: “The captain cried, we sailors wept, / Our tears were tears of joy!”
This optimism doesn’t seem to fit with the general existential bent of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” or with the fact that the poet and heroine take a downward direction at the end, which suggests a sort of nautical lover’s leap. And yet, as I’ve noted in the previous section, the final dive to the ocean floor could suggest, albeit in a negative fashion, the mirror image of the flight of the bar-room ceiling in the opening stanza. Perhaps this is as optimistic as an existential poem can get. Or, perhaps this suggests agnosticism more than Sartre’s existentialism, where the primacy of existence over essence renders Christian or theological existentialism a contradiction in terms (I would argue that Christian existentialists start off as existentialists yet end up as essentialists). In any case, the poet at the end of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is far from asserting any sort of essentialist position. He does, however, leave the possibility open, in what might be seen as agnostic style.
The final stanza suggests that at the end of our lives we’ll most likely find oblivion, but — who knows? — there may be more. In the very moment of extinction, when the lovers hit the ocean bed, we’re left with a mirror image of a world of upward flight, a world beyond this world, whatever that may entail. This positive outcome is suggested by the use of positive paradoxical imagery related to music, food, love, and laughter, and also by the reversal of negative hierarchical categories related to behind and dirt. On a less abstruse level, one might argue that even if there’s no inkling of poetic meaning in the great beyond, the lovers are ‘saved’ by their immersion in the present, in seizing the day. In Marvell’s terms, though they cannot make their sun stand still, yet they will make him run.
“Crucifiction Lane”
“A Whiter Shade of Pale” lies somewhere between the optimism of “A Salty Dog” and the pessimism of “Crucifiction Lane.” In “A Whiter Shade of Pale” sea-sickness accompanies drinking and having a good time, whereas in “Crucifiction Lane” it suggests suicide: the poet is not just “feeling kinda seasick,” but rather lurching from side to side on a boat in bad weather, with death awaiting him in the water below: “All my sick is in my stomach / All my sweat is clearly fear / […] Tell the helmsman, ‘Veer to starboard’ / Bring this ship around to port / And if the sea was not so salty / I could sink instead of walk.”
Here there’s no final happiness, as in the tears of joy! in “A Salty Dog.” The closest we come to any hint of salvation is the request, “in case you find your Maker / Perhaps you’ll plead for us a bit.” The oblique reference to Christ walking on water (presumably as a fisherman of souls) seems both a rejection of that possibility and an acknowledgment that drowning would be preferable to continuing to walk in this world. The lyric thus veers toward the obsession of existentialists from Kierkegaard to Camus: suicide. The despair in the poem appears to be irradicable, and hence the lyric appears to be closer to the hard-core French existentialism of Sartre and Camus than to the existential essentialism of ‘Christian existentialists’ like Kierkegaard.
The possibility of Grace doesn’t clearly operate in “A Whiter Shade of Pale” either, yet two things suggest a substitute or consolation. The first is the oblique suggestion of a positive ending in the mirrored vertical flights toward the ceiling and ocean floor. The second is human connection. In “Crucifiction Lane,” the poet’s alienation is intense, as we can see in lines such as “There’s a river running through me / On its tide I tried to hide,” “Can’t you hear me, mother, calling you?,” and “if you could see inside me / I don’t think you’d have me here.” In “A Whiter Shade of Pale” on the other hand the poet and heroine are integrated into a larger group of people partying, they at some point talk to a miller, and they get closer to each other as the song goes on. Neither of them are alienated individuals, which suggests that the heroine’s yearning for the sea is not escapism or suicide, but something else. She’s home on shore-leave, rather than here on shore-leave, again suggesting that she doesn’t have a fundamental problem with notions such as home, belonging, or connection. Like a later-day Brandy, she can connect to shore life, yet “She could feel the ocean fall and rise / She saw its ragin’ glory.”
In terms of existentialism, the heroine seems more like Camus who lauds human contact, than like Sartre who emphasizes alienation. The final phrase, “we attacked the ocean bed,” is important because it reminds the reader that the poet and the heroine share a deep human connection. This connection is symbolized by the depth of the sea, whereas earlier the sea suggested how different they were: she was only on shore leave whereas he was a land-lubber, despite his comment, “in truth we were at sea” — a truth he may see only afterwards, when he writes about his encounter. Also, the poet and the heroine had different takes on Neptune, the mermaid, and the vestal virgins leaving for the coast: the poet uses them as cards in his seduction repertoire, while she sees them as part of an epic landscape to which she’s drawn.
Their final connection is crucial in the existential context — keeping in mind that Sartre’s key theme is alienation — because connection (or engagement in life) combats alienation. It’s even tempting to suggest that we can live with absurdity, yet a life without connection is perhaps not worth living. Sartre suggests this in Nausea, when Antoine can’t find a meaningful connection in his fling in Bouville or in his long-term relationship in Paris. Nor can he connect to Nature. In this sense he is the anti-Romantic, unlike Camus, who seems to have a Romantic streak in him, as is suggested by his famous passage from The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), which in it’s individualistic and somewhat pantheist revolt parallels Byron’s Manfred and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: “This universe, now without a Master, didn’t seem to [Sisyphus] sterile or futile. Each grain of the rock, each mineral splendour of that mountain of night, to him alone formed the world” (trans. RYC). In his essay, “Existentialisme Entre Nature et Culture: Camus Contre Sartre,” Pierre Zima argues that “Contrary to Sartre, who argues for a subjective or aesthetic order that the subject imposes on the nature and universe of objects, Camus doesn’t accept the dominance over nature implied by Sartre’s rationalism.” To exemplify this, Zima says that the following phrase (from Noces à Tipasa, 1938) is “inconcevable chez Sartre”: “In the Spring, Tipasa is inhabited by the gods, and the gods speak in the sunlight and in the smell of absinthe” (trans. RYC).
Another point to remember here is that even though their connection is not like that of Dante and Beatrice, neither is it dirty or meaningless. In this sense they are closer to Noces à Tipasa than to nausea in Bouville — or Boue-ville, Mud-town. Rather, their love resembles the star-grinding power we find in Cohen’s “Closing Time,” where the poet’s old companion rubs “half the world against her thigh.” Again, the use of the pronoun we in “we attacked the ocean bed” is crucial. Previously, the poet says (after she says she’s on shore-leave) that “in truth we were at sea.” He may use the we here in retrospect, or he may have already learned something from her, but at the moment he still seems to be very much the land-lubber trying to get the wild mermaid to sleep with him (right after this we he suggests she’s taken Neptune for a ride). Yet by the end of the poem he’s learned more, perhaps from her sadness about Neptune and perhaps from whatever it is that they learn from the miller’s tale.
“Suzanne”
The dense ambiguity of the ending — what I’m tempted to call its agnostic existentialism — doesn’t let us say exactly what will happen when they hit the ocean floor. Who knows, she may become the type of secularized Christ-figure Cohen sees in “Suzanne” (poem 1966, song 1967):
Now, Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river / She’s wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters / And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor / And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers / There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning / They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever / While Suzanne holds the mirror.
I refer to Cohen’s song for a number of reasons, one being that its final image of a mirror is an item which crops up often in Reid’s poetry. We see it in the third stanza of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” where the poet tries to get the heroine to look at herself in it. We see it in “Venus Exploding,” where the poet says that thinking about fortune, fate and instincts can be hazardous: “You can get lost in the mirror.” We also see it in “Homberg,” where it suggests at once the hallucinatory world of Alice in Wonderland as well as the real world in which one can see one’s actual physical reflection. When the poet tries to get the heroine to look into the mirror (presumably to force her to agree with him), we don’t know exactly why she doesn’t comply. She isn’t one to be led by the nose; she isn’t likely to indulge him in whatever brand of psychological manipulation he might attempt. It’s also possible that she refuses not so much because she disagrees with self-reflection (even if she might lose herself in the mirror), but because like Suzanne she’s already skilled in its use.